When you buy a new PC, many people wonder if they could sell the old one to “get back” some of the investment, but sometimes it is difficult to know how much money you should ask for so as not to overshoot or fall short and that the sale is priced fairly. In this article we are going to try to help you so that you can assess how much your old PC costs when it comes to putting it up for sale.
Many users decide to sell their old PC instead of reusing it for other purposes or giving it to a family member or friend. It is something normal, because after all if you are not going to use it, why do you want to have it occupying a place? Especially when in terms of hardware, the more time passes and the older a component is, the more it devalues.
How much can you sell your old PC for?
The first thing you should take into account, even before you start to assess how much it cost you to buy it at the time, is the age and the type of use that you have given it. A gaming PC that has been used to play quite intensively for 5-6 years is not the same as an office PC that has had sporadic use. Likewise, you should bear in mind that if you had a cryptocurrency mining system turned on 24 × 7, those hardware components will have lost much more value.
As a reference and depending on the component, this can be a point of reference for the different hardware components of a PC in the second hand market depending on how old they are:
- Less than a year: subtract 20% from its new value.
- Between 1 and 2 years: subtract between 25 and 30% from its new value.
- More than 2 years: it is the critical point because it is already without guarantee, so you have to subtract between 40 and 50% from its new value.
- Between 3 and 5 years: subtract 60% from its new value.
- More than 5 years: subtract between 60 and 75% from its new value.
This of course depends on the type of use it has had, the state it is in, and the component it is, since it does not age the same, for example, a power supply or a graphics card as RAM memories.
Once you have assessed the type and time of use that your equipment has had, you must break down its hardware components. Here the ideal is that you look for the specific or at least similar pieces in forums and second-hand sales websites to see how people value them.
For example, let’s say your old PC has a GTX 970 , a graphics that at the time was mid-high range and that cost around 350 euros. If you have been using it on a gaming PC for 4-5 years, you cannot aspire to ask for 300 euros for it, not even 200 because here you have to take into account its equivalence in the current market .
Today that GTX 970 is inferior to a GTX 1660 in terms of performance, and these are priced around 200 euros today. Taking that into consideration and the fact that the graphic is 5-6 years old, its price should be around 100 euros right now, even less if you take into consideration the price at which other people sell it in the second-hand market.
A practical example
Suppose we have a gaming PC composed of the following hardware:
- Intel Core i5-6600K
- Scythe Mugen 5
- ASUS Prime Z270M-Plus
- 2 × 8 GB G.Skill Trident Z DDR4-3000 MHz
- Crucial MX500 250GB
- AMD Radeon Vega 64
- Corsair RM650x
- Thermaltake Core V21
- 2x Corsair ML120 additional fans
The equipment is around two and a half years old, and its use has been for sporadic, non-intensive gaming, with a use for games of approximately 8-10 hours per week. Bought new, the price of this equipment was around 1,500 euros (especially for the graphics) but, how much could we ask for this old PC in the second-hand market?
Taking into account the age, use and hardware of the equipment, a realistic valuation for its components would be approximately:
- € 80 per processor.
- € 40 for the plate.
- € 15 for the heatsink.
- € 80 for RAM.
- € 20 for the SSD.
- € 180 for the chart.
- € 60 for the fountain.
- € 20 for the box.
- € 15 for additional fans.
In total, this appraisal adds up to 510 euros, so to round off we could sell this old PC for about 500 euros. Look, after less than three years the equipment would be sold for a third of what it cost, because it has passed the critical point of two years which is when most components lose their warranty.
